As part of my experiment in cognitive enhancement, I went to meet my fellow Mensans to see what we had in common. To see what kind of people were united by high IQ scores, and to see if they came across as more intelligent or different in any other way.
Every year, Mensa invites its members to meet for a weekend of fun and games in a different British city. In September 2015, it was in Glasgow. Of the 300 or so attendees, I was the last to arrive. I was lucky to get there at all: I forgot to register before the deadline, got the dates mixed-up and then booked a hotel in the wrong part of the city.
The meeting ran from Thursday to Monday, but I could only make the Saturday night. So by the time I rocked up in the early evening at a new-looking hotel built across the Clyde from the steel armadillo that is the Glasgow Science Centre, the fun and games had been under way for some time. I know this because the first Mensa signs I followed led me to an actual Games Room. The used coffee cups and scattered empty chairs indicated the fun had finished, and seemed to have been replaced by two men arguing over how to use the computer.
Tables in the next room bulged with stapled paper. There were dozens and dozens of printed newsletters, with titles like ‘Cognito’, ‘Now’, ‘Parnassus’, ‘Pathseeker’ and ‘Economania’, each produced by one of Mensa’s special interest groups. What do people in Mensa do? Turns out that many of them write articles, edit newsletters and circulate them to other members who share an interest in country music, aircraft, cars, football, home recording studios, Americana, empathy, beekeeping, fridge magnet collections and at least two full tables-worth of more topics. I scooped up as many newsletters as I could carry and walked to the bar.
That’s where I met John and Mary, who had both been members of Mensa since the 1970s. ‘I started coming to these events to meet intelligent women,’ John told me. While he obviously had, his appeal as an intelligent man had not brought the desired reward and he was still single. Mary told me: ‘Most people are very friendly but watch out for the oddballs’. Then she hurriedly reassured me. The oddballs were very welcome too, and nobody in Mensa judged them.
Both said they kept their Mensa membership a secret from friends, and came to events like the Glasgow meeting because they were social and fun. They saw the same people each year and enjoyed catching-up, but mostly they did not see each other outside Mensa events. Why would they? We don’t necessarily have anything in common just because we all have high IQs, Mary said.
As we talked about the society, John mentioned there had been a big Mensa scandal in the 1990s. I looked it up later. In 1995, the organization’s long-standing chief executive Harold Gale was fired for running a private business from Mensa HQ in Wolverhampton. A tribunal and an internal enquiry followed and within a couple of years Gale was dead in a car accident. Before his death, Gale would tell people how he was ejected from the Wolverhampton offices in a ‘dawn raid’ led by then Mensa chairman, Sir Clive Sinclair, who then had the locks on the building changed.
After Sir Clive stepped down, Julie Baxter (IQ of 154) was appointed chair in 1997. She left after just nine months, complaining the Mensa committee was obsessed with ‘selfaggrandisement and the pursuit of power for its own sake’ and that some of the men on it were ‘sad people with no social life’ fixated on the organization. Things in Mensa were much calmer now, John said.
John asked me if I had joined any of the special interest groups. He edited one of the newsletters and told me about the pile on offer in the other room. I was about to reply that I had already found them when he added they were for reference only and I shouldn’t take any away – Mensa didn’t want non-members to read them. When John wasn’t looking, I asked the barman for a bag to hide my stash.
The more people I talked to at the Glasgow meeting, the more I realized that nobody wanted to talk about what I was interested in: their IQ, how high it was, or how they thought it made them any different. One man said he had put his Mensa-endorsed IQ score on his CV, and then taken it off again. They didn’t know each other’s IQs and claimed they didn’t want to. At first I thought people were embarrassed, but then I started to believe that they just didn’t care. It was a social group, like any other, virtually everyone said, like joining a tennis club or a local history society.
Except of course, it wasn’t. Tennis club members join to play the sport. Members of a local history society don’t come along to discuss gardening or golf, they are united by a shared interest in local history, and that’s what they want to talk about when they meet up. Yet, IQ and intelligence, the only thing that all of these Mensa members – many of whom had come to Glasgow on their own – knew they had in common with the person sitting next to them, seemed taboo.
The person I was sitting next to was called Charles and he ran the Mensa supervised tests to screen would-be members in one region of the country. That was lucky for me, as I was keen to gather some intelligence on how I might return and sit the test again. Journalists who sit the tests should be asked to declare themselves, he said, so I had been lucky there too. Charles said he was always sure to ask at each test session if a journalist was present, and to warn they couldn’t interview any of the other people there. He repeated the rules, he said, when he did the PowerPoint presentation before each set of questions. I liked Charles but I was glad he hadn’t run the test session I went to.
So if they didn’t want to explore and compare IQs, why did these people join Mensa? Most I spoke with said they were simply curious, or that it had been more popular when they first became members in the 1970s. Britain was a kinder place then, many said, and less willing to ridicule people who were proud of their talents and abilities. A couple of them said they’d had bad experiences at school, either bullied or told they wouldn’t achieve anything, and wanted to prove their worth. A couple of people said that, but I got the sense others felt the same, but were unwilling to tell me. A suspicious number of their ‘friends’ and ‘people they knew’ had joined for that reason, they said.
If joining Mensa had proved anything, even to themselves, I was not sure that it had helped them feel more at ease. When I got up to leave, the conversation around the table was about the glossy Mensa monthly magazine posted to members. The organization sent them in clear plastic bags. Some members were unhappy and wanted to receive them in unmarked brown envelopes. ‘I don’t want the postman to see them,’ one man said, ‘because he just takes the piss.’
As I walked out, I saw a group of people who had arrived to use the hotel gym look at my Mensa name badge, and at my plastic bag full of leaflets and special interest newsletters. The bag, I realized, said on the outside that it was for my dirty laundry with the hotel’s compliments. I remembered what Mary had said about the oddballs and left them all to their games.
* * *
Do you know your IQ? Most people who say they do get it wrong. Friends tell me their IQ was measured in school as 160, 180, even as high as 200. That’s possible, but it’s extremely unlikely their IQ remains that high today. Their intelligence hasn’t necessarily changed, but the way we measure it has.
IQ scores based on mental age tests, as Alfred Binet intended, are indeed a good way to identify children who might need extra attention. But they carry an obvious flaw. Simply getting older is enough to shrink IQ.*
That’s why childhood IQ measured in this way is redundant in adulthood. My thirty-year-old friend who says she has an IQ of 160, for example, is probably referring to her ten-year-old self who was told she had a mental age of sixteen. For her IQ to be measured as 160 in that way today, she would have to possess the mental age of a forty-eight-year-old, which somehow doesn’t sound as impressive, and is anyway absurd, because it assumes average performance on intelligence tests marches ever upwards into old age and beyond.
Using the ratio of mental and physical ages to calculate IQ is useless beyond the classroom, and is a source of continuing confusion, but it does have the merit of linguistic accuracy. The other way used to measure IQ – and the one celebrated by Mensa – does not even get the name right.
The tests of intelligence used by Mensa do not present the results as a quotient. Instead, they use a statistical formula to compare an individual’s performance to an average. The further the deviation from the average, the higher (or lower) the score awarded.
What’s important here is this average does not reflect a real score on a real test. It is a number plucked from the air to represent average performance. The number used for IQ tests is 100, but that does not mean, as some newspaper stories about kids who get into Mensa imply, that someone with an IQ of 100 has answered 100 of 150 questions right, or achieved 100 per cent on something. The 100 is a score awarded for an average performance. It doesn’t have to be 100, it could be set instead at 200 or 900, in the same way as football, rugby and tennis all award a different number of points for a goal, try and point.
A better-than-average performance on an IQ test gets someone a score higher than 100, but how much higher? It depends on the IQ scale used and is another reason why a single number – ‘I have an IQ of 145’ – is useless on its own. (Just as it’s important to know if the sport is tennis or football when someone says the score is 15–0.)
The most commonly used IQ scoring system assumes two-thirds of people will have IQs of between 85 and 115. IQs below and above those boundaries get progressively rarer, until the distribution says only about one in fifty people will have an IQ below 70 or above 130. Towards the edges, the numbers drop off quickly. Only about one in 1600 has an IQ above 150, and only one in 30,000 above 160.
That’s ultimately what modern IQ tests measure. Rather than comparing your performance to your age, they compare it to everybody else’s performance. This is important – IQs are relative. However the overall performance of a group may change, there will always be individuals within that group with IQs at the low and high end of the scale. It’s impossible for everyone to have an IQ of above 100, no matter how much we educate, selectively breed or cognitively enhance. When people say things like, ‘nearly half of Americans have an IQ of under 100’ as a criticism, they reveal more about their own intelligence than anyone else’s.
We have a curious relationship with intelligence these days. Rather than looking down on people with lower IQs, as was common when the feeble-minded were ridiculed, much public scorn is reserved today for those towards the upper end of the scale. Perhaps this is down to envy and jealousy, as the benefits of mental ability become more pronounced, or maybe it’s a reflection of a society that has fallen out of love with expertise. The admonishment is especially severe for those who both choose to sit a Mensa test and then pay to join. Browse any online forum when the subject of high-IQ clubs comes up and the comments are almost as derogatory as some of those made about the feeble-minded a century ago.
‘I qualify for Mensa, but upon looking into who they are, I realized it’s just a club for the socially inept, because more often than not intellects [sic] somehow wind up socially retarded.’
And: ‘Highly intelligent people are usually incredibly stupid’.
And: ‘The few people I’ve known who joined Mensa were misfits who (or whose parents) wanted to try and compensate for some deep sense of insecurity and inadequacy by having something they could think was bigger than “normal” people’s’.
The modern relationship is most awkward when it comes to high intelligence in children. Some surveys suggest as many as one in five girls and one in ten boys at secondary schools hide their ability at maths, chiefly to avoid being picked on and bullied.
Then there are the prodigies. A prodigy is a bit different to a savant – while a savant does things beyond most of us, it is the age at which a prodigy achieves things, rather than their fantastic nature, which draws attention. Few prodigies drew as much attention as William Sidis. Plenty of people study for a maths degree at Harvard University; William Sidis became famous because he did so when he was eleven. By seventeen, he was teaching undergraduates at what is now Rice University in Houston, and a year later he returned to Harvard to take a second degree, this time in law.
For a while, Sidis was described as America’s most famous child. When he arrived at Harvard, newspaper reporters asked his opinion on national politics. When he suggested a radium-powered rocket could reach Venus in twenty minutes, the Chicago Tribune made it front page news. And when the newly arrived Sidis delivered a Harvard lecture to staff at the maths department, the New York Times compared it to the boyhood preaching of Jesus Christ. (This was a full fifty-six years before the same paper changed musical history with a front page story about an Alabama radio DJ who refused to play Beatles’ records because John Lennon had said in a months-old interview they were more popular than Jesus.)
Alongside the plaudits for Sidis, others in the media liked to kick sand in his face. Reporters mocked his lack of interest in sport and pointed out he was afraid of dogs. A vowed celibate, when Sidis said in an interview it was awkward when girls flirted with him, the response was ferocious. A man can’t learn about women from books, especially calculus books,’ one newspaper scolded. Asked for her opinion on the fuss by a New York newspaper, a twenty-year-old woman from Dallas who had never met Sidis said, ‘I bet that he is a sissy, sports a wrist watch and wears his handkerchief in his sleeve.’
Sidis is known as much today for what he failed to achieve in adult life. Halfway through his law studies, he was arrested when a socialist May Day parade turned violent. To avoid prison, his parents took him to California, after which Sidis sought a quiet life. He took a series of low-grade and menial jobs. This was, he said, so he did not have to use his mind.
The press gloried in his apparent fall. Even the great minds of the US legal system joined in. After Sidis sued the New Yorker magazine for breach of privacy over an article that mocked him, the court of appeals concluded: ‘Even if Sidis had loathed public attention we think his uncommon achievements and personality would have made the attention permissible’. It added: ‘His subsequent history, containing as it did an answer to the question of whether or not he had fulfilled his early promise, was still a matter for public concern’.
Another much more recent prodigy who landed with a bump is Sufiah Yusof, who went to Oxford University to begin a maths degree in 1997 aged just thirteen. Two years later, she disappeared, and was eventually found after a high-profile police search working as a waitress in a cafe. In March 2008, a tabloid newspaper revealed she had later become a prostitute.
The tone of the coverage of such cases is almost gloating, as if these young prodigies somehow made claims with their early high achievement that they could not justify; as if their unusual intelligence was a deliberate ploy to annoy the rest of us. Of all the sins of youth, cognitive precociousness seems one of the hardest to forgive.
Sometimes, Mensa and its members do themselves no favours when it comes to the organization’s public image. In the week before Christmas 2012, the BBC and Mensa member and spokesman Peter Baimbridge were both forced to make grovelling apologies after an interview live on BBC Breakfast in which Baimbridge described people with IQs of 60 and below as root vegetables. ‘So most IQ tests will have Mr and Mrs Average scoring 100, and the higher you get, the brighter you are. And if your IQ is somewhere around 60 then you are probably a carrot,’ Baimbridge said.
Amid the (deserved) criticism he received, many of the responses featured a common belief about those such as Baimbridge with a high IQ. Some of you are probably thinking it now. It’s neatly summarized by liamf12 of Oxford, who wrote in the online comment section beneath a news story about the carrot apology in the web version of the Daily Mail: ‘That’s the problem in this country, firms are now fast tracking graduates into management roles when my experience of intellectuals is that they can give the right answer to a question but have a distinct lack of common sense.’
After the sister of European Space Agency scientist Matt Taylor – one of a team who landed a spacecraft on a speeding comet in 2014 – told reporters her brother sometimes struggled to remember where he parked his car, the Daily Telegraph was moved to ask its readers the same question: why do geniuses lack common sense?
Common sense is the claimed kryptonite of the superintelligent, the Achilles heel of having a good IQ score. Common sense, in fact, dictates that the more intelligence someone has, the less common sense they can fit in their oversized brain. Unlike IQ, which is shown to correlate positively with life success, albeit indicated by some pretty crude metrics, common sense is believed to not just fail to show the same link, but to actually decrease with IQ. That’s a pretty bold assumption, and an assumption seems to be as far as it goes. There is no hard evidence that IQ is negatively associated with common sense; mainly because common sense is just as hard to define as intelligence.
Common sense is typically described as a kind of practical intelligence.† It’s usually measured as a judgement on someone’s decision making, but the verdict on whether someone shows common sense or not seems to come down to whether or not the person doing the judging agrees with the particular decision made. As we saw, high IQ tends (on average) towards left-leaning liberalism, so perhaps it’s not surprising one of the most common targets for failing to show a lack of common sense is the (left-leaning liberal) idea of political correctness.
In 2009, a professor of theoretical medicine called Bruce Charlton wrote an academic exploration of the apparent high IQ–low common sense paradox, which he dubbed the clever sillies. High intelligence was an asset when humans were evolving, he said, because it enabled abstract analysis to tackle serious problems in the distant past that could be life-or-death situations. But modern humans, he continued, don’t need this trait as much. In fact, we have by now developed mature and reliable specific responses to most of the situations we find ourselves in, including social encounters. He says these domain-specific shared responses are what most people mean by common sense – the generally accepted and road-tested way to do things.
High IQ people, Charlton suggests, are different. They simply can’t resist the temptation to continue to deploy their abstract problem-solving skills in even familiar situations, for which the best options have already been approved by the rest of the community. They are driven to find novel solutions, at the expense of the tried and trusted common sense. And many of these ideas are wrong, or worse, ridiculous.
It’s an interesting – if speculative – idea. But it would seem to succeed or fail based on the strength of the examples: what kind of novel solutions are wrongly offered by the clever sillies to what kind of established problems? And, frustratingly, Charlton doesn’t offer any. He talks about physical scientists being silly outside work and social scientists being silly both in and outside of work. Abstract analysis of social problems, he suggests, produces left-wing political views. He bundles the work of the clever-sillies together as ‘political correctness’ in which, ‘foolish and false ideas have become moralistically-enforced among the ruling intellectual elite. And these ideas have invaded academic, political and social discourse.’‡
A dislike of political correctness is today a common stamp of conservatism, so perhaps deciding who is a clever silly just comes down to one’s politics. Or maybe the desire to attribute a lack of common sense to intelligent people is just another version of the scorn they receive from some quarters, which may itself be a reaction to the historical superiority claimed by those esteemed men of the Mutual Autopsy Society and their eugenic friends. It’s certainly an impression that some go out of their way to promote.
Albert Einstein is often said to have had little common sense. The evidence? He didn’t like to wear socks and he sometimes got lost when walking around Princeton (where he lived well into his seventies) and had to ask for directions to his house. This was a man, it barely needs to be said, who was acutely aware of the impact of his own decision making, and in one case – urging US President Roosevelt to build an atomic bomb – was tortured by the consequences for years afterwards. It is hard to argue with the view of the man himself. ‘Common sense,’ Einstein said, ‘is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.’
While the nature of common sense and intelligence may be elusive, the concept of g – general intelligence, as identified by Charles Spearman and accepted by most psychologists – is easier to grasp. It’s mental prowess, a measure of how well someone can turn their brain and their talents to a number of different tasks, all of which involve some degree of cognitive processing. Emotional intelligence, managerial intelligence, sexual intelligence and the rest – if they employ the higher functions of the brain then they almost certainly all rely on the same foundation of g.
And despite its bad press and the way new interpretations of intelligence try to set themselves up as superior, logic would suggest that, on average, someone’s IQ score reflects their general intelligence. Plenty of psychologists are happy to accept the link, and in fact they pose a challenge to critics, to those who insist IQ is not a reliable measure of g. Find something else, they demand. Conceive a separate measure of cognitive ability. And then show this new measure, while reliably indicating general intelligence, is independent of IQ.
It can’t be done, or at least it hasn’t been done so far. Simply put, IQ is a pretty good indication of intelligence, or at least the best way we have found so far to try to constrain and quantify intelligence.
But it’s also true that IQ does not – and cannot – cover the entire spectrum of human abilities that go into judging if someone is intelligent. Or indeed, whether they lack intelligence. Some of the sharpest and most controversial arguments over IQ are over the way it is applied at the bottom end of the scale. While Alfred Binet devised the original intelligence tests because he wanted to identify and help low-achievers, for some of these people the concept has become a way to kill them. In many American states, someone’s IQ, and how it relates to their intelligence, is quite literally a matter of life and death.
On death row, the lights burn all night. Joe Arridy didn’t mind that, as it gave him more time to play with his toy train. It was a wind-up train with two carriages. Sometimes, Joe would reach through the bars of his cell and send the train puffing down the jailhouse corridor. Then he would squeal with excitement when one of the other men sent the toy back to him – a prison guard or one of his fellow condemned prisoners in a neighbouring cage. Usually it was Norman Wharton, who was there waiting to die because he killed a policeman. Wharton would play with Joe and his train in this way for hours. Back and forth. Choo-choo!
When they tired of watching the game, wife-killer Angelo Agnes and Pete Catalana, murderer and drug-dealer, would reach out from their own cells and tip the train onto its side. ‘A wreck! A wreck!’ Joe would shout with glee. ‘Fix the wreck!’
Joe Arridy was twenty-three but he had a mental age closer to a toddler. Roy Best, the warden at Colorado State Prison in Canon City, gave Joe the train as a present for the Christmas of 1938, Joe’s last. Less than two weeks later, Best and Father Schaller, the prison chaplain, came to Joe’s cell, to accompany him on the short walk up the gravel road to the death house on Woodpecker Hill. Joe wanted to take his train with him, but Agnes said he would hold it.
Best and Schaller had tried to explain to Joe what was about to happen, but he didn’t understand. He was grinning when he walked into the gas chamber. He was still smiling when, wearing just a pair of white shorts and socks, he sat on the middle of the offered three chairs and allowed the guards to fit the straps. Only when the black bandage was placed over his eyes did Joe sense something was not right, and then only for a moment. The grin returned when Best squeezed his hand on his way out. Schaller, tears in his eyes, said goodbye and turned to leave too. The steel door closed.
Joe Arridy was gassed because he had confessed to the rape and murder of a fifteen-year-old girl called Dorothy Drain. It was a miscarriage of justice. No physical evidence put him at the scene, yet the arresting sheriff claimed Joe accurately described, and in great detail, the pattern of wallpaper on the victim’s bedroom wall, her clothes, and his own complex feelings of remorse for the crime.
In fact, Joe could not distinguish red from black or name the days of the week. When Father Schaller read the Lord’s Prayer with him shortly before his death, he had to do so two words at a time so Joe could keep up. Joe was innocent of the crime for which he was condemned, but that is not the point. He was not fit to stand trial in the first place.
Of the 3,100 prisoners sentenced to death and held in US prisons, a fifth are believed to have some degree of intellectual impairment. There are two ways off death row for these people – in a coffin, or to convince an appeal judge they should be spared because they are mentally retarded, their intelligence is low enough to have their sentence commuted to life imprisonment.
The US forbids as cruel and unusual the execution of people with abnormally low mental ability and several states have long used IQ tests to decide the intelligence of convicts and so their fate; the so-called Bright Lines approach. Florida set the bar at an IQ of 70; a score of 71 or above is enough to see someone sentenced to die, while Oklahoma used an IQ threshold of 75. (The Supreme Court intervened in 2014 and told states they needed to be more flexible, but the principle of a cut-off remains.)
Even scoring below the cut-off point has not always been enough to spare people the death penalty. Prosecutors have argued, successfully in some cases, that black and Latin American defendants should have a few points added to their measured IQ scores, to take into account the relatively poor performance of those ethnic groups on intelligence tests. These defendants, the legal argument goes, score low because of social and cultural factors, not because they are intellectually disabled. When their scores are ‘adjusted’ to allow for this, the legal system can execute them. To save people on death row, defence lawyers have to show their clients are not smart enough to die. And to do that, they call Steve Greenspan.
Steve Greenspan is a scientist who has spent his life wrestling the notion of intelligence. In his day job he works as an educational psychologist at the University of Connecticut, studying neuropsychological skills such as reason and judgement, and how they can go wrong. In his spare time he tries to save the lives of condemned prisoners.
Greenspan, for instance, told a Louisiana court in November 2013 a killer called Teddy Chester was mentally retarded and so should not be executed for the murder of a taxi driver in 1995. Chester resented what he saw as an insult, and in a catch-22 situation, argued he was not mentally disabled at all. He said witnesses who described him as a slow learner were lying. Well, his defence said, that is what someone with difficulty in reasoning would say. As I finished this book in late 2016, Chester remains scheduled for execution.
In 2009, Steve Greenspan became involved in work to secure a posthumous pardon for Joe Arridy, a campaign that began not as they often do with a new piece of evidence or a deathbed confession from the real killer, who had been tried and executed years ago. It started with a poem.
Called ‘The Clinic’, by Marguerite Young, the poem was published in 1944. Just twenty lines long, it describes the scene in the Canon City prison the day of Joe’s execution: a weeping warden, a toy train and the killing of a dry-eyed child.
In 1992, the poem found its way to a Rocky Mountains man called Robert Perske. Perske had previously worked as a chaplain at an institute for people with intellectual disabilities, assisting them when they found themselves on the wrong side of both the law and the legal system. When he read the poem, he thought he might still have it in him to help one more, and resolved to find the dry-eyed child who was forced to leave behind his train.
His search took him through every local history and library archive in a string of cities on the eastern side of the Colorado Rockies. He pieced the details together from scanned boxes of microfilms that preserved the reports of long-gone local newspapers: The Pueblo Chieftain, Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, Wyoming State Tribune and the Rocky Mountain News. By 1995 he had Joe’s name, and a decade later a website dedicated to the campaign to clear his name.
As part of that campaign, Steve Greenspan wrote a detailed report on Joe’s low intelligence, based on records uncovered by the people working to clear his name. Greenspan tore apart any claim Joe Arridy could have understood the crime he was accused of, the concept of execution, or the evidence presented at the trial – or that he was able to judge right from wrong. Joe Arridy, he said, had a mental age of four and a half.
Nothing suggested Joe Arridy killed Dorothy Drain; there were no witnesses and no signs he was even near her house. Greenspan’s evidence showed he was unable to have even given the confession that saw him gassed. He was a classic patsy – impressionable, uncomprehending and passive – for police more interested in pursuing their own prejudiced agenda than solving crimes.
Psychiatrists at his trial said Joe was mentally deficient. Joe’s lawyer said this deficiency meant he should be found not guilty due to insanity – he could not, for example, tell right from wrong. But the psychiatrists also told the court Joe was not insane: a person had to be normal before he could lose sanity, and, they said, ‘this defendant has never been normal’. A confused jury sent him to his death.
Joe Arridy never understood he was to be killed or what it meant. Roy Best, the warden who was ordered to execute him, said Joe was the happiest man who ever lived on death row. He spent his final days in his cell making faces in a polished dinner plate. On 5 January 1938, Best asked what he wanted for a last meal.
‘Ice cream’, said Joe.§
A number of scientists, including Steve Greenspan, are trying to get the legal system to broaden its view of intelligence beyond IQ, to take into account the many different ways it can be defined, and so the equally many ways a lack of intelligence can be identified.
In the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the American Psychiatric Association scrapped IQ scores as the primary way to diagnose intellectual disability (previously called mental retardation). Instead it emphasizes the impact of cognitive ability on behaviour. Greenspan and other psychologists are trying to persuade the US courts to view intelligence through the same broader lens. They are developing tests of how someone can conceive abstract ideas such as numbers and time, their selfesteem and ability to follow laws, and practical skills including use of money and efforts to protect their own health.
In 2013, the first such test was released, called the Diagnostic Adaptive Behaviour Scale. Just like IQ, it too boils down the concept of intelligence to a single number – which means it could be used by the courts to distinguish people. The benchmark score on the test is 100; someone with a score of 70 or below would be judged to have an intellectual disability. For someone on death row, that could be enough to save their life, in a way an IQ test, which measures a much narrower set of criteria, would not.
In the search for intelligence tests beyond IQ, Greenspan has examined the role of gullibility: how likely someone is to go along with the suggestion of others and not think through the consequences. This can be framed as a failure to use intelligence wisely under certain social conditions, and even people who we think of as highly intelligent can behave in a gullible way.
In November 2012, Oxford University-educated physics professor Paul Frampton was convicted and sentenced to fifty-six months for drug smuggling in Argentina. He claimed to have been the victim of a scam after supposedly meeting a model on a dating website, and said he had been tricked by gangsters into transporting cocaine hidden in the lining of a suitcase. A common reaction to such cases is to ask how someone could be so, not gullible, but stupid. Greenspan thinks such people might have a cognitive style relying too heavily on intuition, and this makes it hard for them to turn their large intellects to certain situations. They are book-smart, not street-smart.
Gullibility can make people with learning disabilities vulnerable to sexual abuse and practical jokes, but it can also make otherwise intelligent people do extremely foolish things, including castrate themselves and commit suicide. In 1997, some thirty-eight members of the Heaven’s Gate cult in California were found dead after they killed themselves because they were told a spaceship was parked behind a passing comet and was going to pick up their souls. Some victims made farewell videos, some of which are on the internet, and they appear bright and articulate people. Indeed, Greenspan and his colleagues have searched in vain for any sign people with mental retardation are more likely to be seduced by the messages and promises of such groups.
A pattern emerges. While people with intellectual disability tend to be gullible and so act foolishly in social situations, allowing themselves to be duped and coerced by those who seek to take advantage, the stupid actions of the otherwise intelligent tend to be in practical domains and entered into voluntarily. Stories of people who found ingenious ways to accidentally hurt or kill themselves were a staple of the early internet years, and were codified as the Darwin Awards – awarded to people who remove their genes from the collective pool in an ‘extraordinarily idiotic manner’.
This could be down to different personality types. Impulsive risk-takers are more likely to crash and burn than those who rarely stray from solid ground. Or it could be conventional ways to think about intelligence miss out a crucial ability – to think and behave rationally. The psychologist Keith Stanovich at the University of Toronto has coined the term ‘dysrationalia’ to describe people who struggle with rationality, just as people with dyslexia have specific difficulty with language. Rational thinking, he says, should be measured and called RQ. And just as high intelligence is no protection from dyslexia, so a top IQ score would be no guarantee the same person will have a high RQ.
To think rationally is to act according to one’s goals and beliefs. But it is also to form and hold beliefs supported by available evidence. Humans are generally accepted as the only animal capable of rational thought, and one reason we are considered to be the most intelligent. But humans are also the only animals who can think irrationally. We all have a number of cognitive biases that try to pull us away from reason. One of the most important is the myside or confirmation bias – the way people gather and assess evidence tends to be in line with their existing opinions. Another is the way we jump to conclusions and decisions, making as little cognitive effort as possible. The most famous example is: A bat and ball cost £1.10 in total. The bat costs £1 more than the ball. How much is the ball? Most people quickly say (or at least think) 10p but that’s wrong (the total then would be £1.20).
This thinking style and the difficulty of avoiding it (and even its potential power) have been discussed at length for years. What matters here to the question of intelligence is that susceptibility to these types of irrational thought does not seem to be strongly linked to IQ.
Because of this, and also because, as we’ve seen, theories of intelligence tend to prosper when they are presented as counter to IQ, Stanovich argues strongly his idea of rational thought is a separate cognitive category. Intelligence is IQ, he says, and rationality is different to both.
Yet, as rational thought is measured in part by the actions it directs, rationality seems to be covered by the catch-all broad definition of intelligence being something you use to get what you want. To act according to beliefs to achieve goals, however irrational those beliefs might be, demands intelligence.
If Stanovich is wrong and intelligence and rationality do overlap, this is good news for our efforts to enhance intelligence. For rationality can be increased. Rational thought can be encouraged by making people aware of the types of cognitive bias that constantly seek to undermine it. No clever neuroscience necessary. Just thinking about circumstances in a different way, reframing the question, can usually help.
Example: a guaranteed way to double your chance of winning on the national lottery exists. Want to know what it is? Buy a second ticket with different numbers. Congratulations, your chances have soared from one in fourteen million to one in seven million. Don’t order the sports car just yet.
That sounds facile, but it’s the principle relied on by everyone from con artists to advertisers to persuade people to part with their money. It’s why headlines about environmental risks ‘doubling’ the chance of cancer scare people with no good reason, and why politicians and special interest groups can so successfully hide misleading agendas behind a phrase to seduce our cognitive biases. How gullible are you? Send £50 for our searching questionnaire.
* If a five-year-old with an IQ of 200 sat the same IQ test a day later, which happened to be her sixth birthday, and scored a (very advanced) mental age of 10 again, her IQ would still shrink to 167 overnight.
† Unlike presumably the impractical kind that gave us the internet, heroic decreases in childhood mortality and the A380 super-jumbo.
‡ Dr Charlton wrote a book Thought Prison about how the rise of political correctness meant that Western civilization was doomed. Again, he didn’t specify examples – asking readers to supply their own from personal experience and unofficial knowledge.
§ Joe was officially pardoned by the governor of Colorado in 2011.